There’s Plenty to Read About the ‘Trial of the Century’

The epigraph of Mary Cummings’s book about the trial of the century — the early 20th, at least — pretty much sets the tone for the tawdry, misogynistic and, even in the 21st century, painfully familiar narrative that follows in the latest recaps of Stanford White’s murder, one by her and another by Simon Baatz.

“What is the chief end of man?” Mark Twain asks. “To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.”

Add sex and ego as two more goals and the self-destructive means to those ends (lusted after by women, too) are re-examined in Ms. Cummings’s “Saving Sin City: William Travers Jerome, Stanford White, and the Original Crime of the Century” (Pegasus Books) and Mr. Baatz’s “The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century” (Mulholland Books; Little, Brown and Co.).

Both make for good late season beach reads, even though each explores the 1906 love triangle killing through different prisms. Ms. Cummings focuses on Jerome, the Manhattan district attorney, in a methodical, but engrossing account. Mr. Baatz’s more breezy version attempts to place the sexual exploitation of Evelyn Nesbit in a modern context.

For anyone who forgot, Evelyn Nesbit arrives in New York from Philadelphia with her mother in 1900 when she’s 15 and becomes a model. She is cast in the popular musical “Florodora” where she catches the eye of the architect and libertine Stanford White. He befriends her and, after a few months, gets her drunk on champagne and, may or may not, have raped her at his apartment.

She later meets Harry K. Thaw who is, to say the least, an eccentric millionaire. Evelyn tearfully relates the story of her deflowering. Harry marries her. On June 25, 1906, who should the couple encounter on the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, which White designed, but White himself. Harry shoots him as the orchestra plays, “I Could Love a Million Girls.”

No spoiler here, but suffice it to say that the trial featured a novel defense — “Dementia Americana” (that he had temporarily lost his mind upon learning that the honor of his wife had been compromised) — and Harry’s terrifying declaration that “I am as sane as any man on earth.”

Among the bit players in this sordid plot is Anthony Comstock, a former postal inspector who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. (Comstock had persuaded White to drape the 13-foot-tall nude gilded goddess Diana atop Madison Square Garden; her private parts were covered briefly until a gust of wind restored the huntress to her natural state.)

Mr. Baatz has high praise for Nesbit’s “courage and fortitude.” Ms. Cummings concludes that both Jerome and White “came of age just as the values of the old republic — piety, frugality, moral prudery and personal rectitude — were bumping up against new, less inhibited attitudes toward money, morals and sex.” Both of them, she writes, “saw themselves as avatars of modernity” but both had also “crossed the line between audacity and arrogance and sowed the seeds of their fall from grace.”

Of all the wacky characters in this stranger-than-fiction morality play, Thaw may be the only one credited with a modicum of self-mockery. The story is too good to be true, but, supposedly, years later, during a trip to Florida he was so repelled by the cookie-cutter pink stucco Mediterranean Revival mansions that he exclaimed: “I shot the wrong architect.”